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Mental illnesses popular in the US, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anorexia and depression, in particular, are now spreading across the world with the speed of contagious diseases, says Watters, who went about investigating why this was happening although different cultures view mental illnesses through a complex prism of religious, scientific and social attitudes. In short, the West, primarily the US, has been homogenising the way the world goes mad.

Underlying this trend is the western assumption that human beings are innately fragile and should consider many common emotional experiences as illness that require professional intervention. There is also the dangerous assumption that certain types of events in a person’s life, such as being laid off, are certain to result in psychological trauma that requires psychiatric care and medication. Why is mental illness being globalised to such an alarming degree that different conceptions of the troubled mind in different cultures are being overridden by the dominant view and are fast vanishing? (via Exporting disease, making a killing).

View from a bridge

Many years ago, reading The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre, only confirmed suspicions and common knowledge about medical malpractices – at least in India. In the last 10-15 years, it has become commonplace for doctors to get beaten up at hospitals in India. Medical malpractice was, personally, never an issue as I have been off Western medicines for nearly 40 years.

But to see the exploitation, from a distance, by the combination of ‘doctor-pharma company’ is a study in nausea. Western medical system is the single biggest creator of disease! Apart from the cases of Japan-Paxil, Sri Lanka-PTSD-Pfizer, there is the well known case of how family planning activists misused quinacrine in India.

From being highly respected citizens, to being beaten up regularly is sad decline for the medical community.

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